Coming Soon: The 3Drinks Mixological Experience

Air shouldn't be thick but it was at Sugar Mom's, a divey basement hipster bar right off Market Street near Second Street, the shared stomping ground of the happening and hopeless alike. Yes, thick air's a bit like a spork: an abomination, utterly memorable, and at times, endearing.

It was endearing that night. I had a buzz on, and I was seeing an old grade school friend who had recently gone through one of those rough and tumble life experiences that changes a person—a tragic loss or miraculous gain that leaves you feeling weird in your skin on the other side.

Sugar Mom's didn't help that feeling, with its mortar and brick windowless refinery basement full of pianos-turned-tables, extracted bumper cars, pinball machines, a pool table, and—gasp!—a cigarette machine!

I didn't expect much of the joint, and here's where all this is going: I love expecting little and finding much. Knee deep in hipster pretention and with lungs full of thick mystery matter, I ordered a drink whose contents mystified me. It was named for the bar and contained nothing but Jaeger and Mountain Dew. Blech.

Except... not. Maybe it was the deceptively simple bar food or the giddy thrill of smoking inside after the statewide ban, but something about that drink, at that place, at that moment—it worked.

It worked very well. The nostalgic collegiate black licorice punch of Jaeger bounced off the tangy gamer sweat lift of the Mountain Dew. My tongue sizzled like it was tripping on acid and my sinuses cleared for a blissful moment, allowing me to smell the aggregated sweat and funk of the collected hipster bike couriers throbbing and pulsing around me. It was, in a word, transcendent.

And that's what this forthcoming column will be doing. Pairing Roxborough and Manayunk bars with a three-drink sampling of their bar menu, I'll be giving you a breakdown of the best (and worst) experiences in our fair area. I'll consider each bar's projected aesthetic and choose either three beers, cocktails, liquors, or a flight comprising of one of each, and measure each drink on a 10-point metric.

A 1-point drink goes down like water, smells like oxygen, and is as memorable as walking to the john to take a leak. A 10-pointer wakes up taste buds I didn't know I had, smells how I imagine heaven smells, and, like the Sugar Mom Mountain Dew monstrosity, utterly and inextricably lodges itself in my experiential memory.

After the tripartite breakdown, the bar will be assessed and awarded 0 to 3 Drinks overall: 0 meaning the bar should be avoided like the plague, and 3 being an admonishment to run, don't walk, to that bar's next happy hour.

Hold on to your livers, friends—it's going to be a delicious ride.